Ammlung: 'The horrible' often the enemy of 'good'

There's truth in the expression, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” A less-than-perfect report card or athletic performance obscures a child's fine qualities. A disputed point can jettison an otherwise good treaty or piece of legislation. We shouldn’t stop striving for excellence, but “perfection” is rare, transitory and often comes at high cost. Sometimes, good enough is good enough!

But there’s another enemy of the good. It’s the horrible. Often, it's the hypothetical horrible. When we begin by imagining the worst-case scenarios under which we are enjoined to be honest, faithful, forbearing or forgiving, we may become so discouraged, terrified, or outraged that we refuse to try at all! That’s a tragedy.

Imagine that you want to teach your teenager winter driving skills. You want them to safely handle snow, slippery roads and other hazards. Where do you begin?

“Highway Thru Hell,” a reality show on The Weather Channel, features huge trucks straining to crawl up British Columbia's Coquihalla Highway in blizzard conditions, and jackknifing, overturning or tumbling down steep embankments. The heavy-rescue companies are family businesses, some in their fourth generation. But Jamie Davis and Al Quiring don’t begin teaching their children winter driving skills, much less towing and rescue techniques, by throwing them into a truck in the middle of a blizzard and saying, “Best of luck.”

Instead, they go out in a light snow and have their kid practice on a quiet road. Eventually, they tackle harsher weather. They know if they began with driving in worst-case weather, the child would be terrified, dangerously unprepared and tempted to flee to Phoenix.

It’s the same with the virtues we need to navigate life. They take a lot of practice. Sometimes we must exercise them in horrible circumstances. That's the tragedy of being broken human beings in a fallen world. It's understandable that those “horribles” loom large in people's minds. I talk to people about patience, honesty, courage or forgiveness. And someone usually retorts, “But what if a loved one was raped or murdered? What if someone is tortured by terrorists, or told they’ll bear a terribly disabled child? How can you tell them to be patient or brave or self-sacrificing or forgiving?”

Usually, folks are genuinely overwhelmed by the obligation to behave well under extreme duress. But sometimes, they raise the specter of the “hypothetical horribles” to discredit the virtue or excuse their unwillingness to practice it. “I could never forgive that,” leads to “No one should forgive that,” followed by, “Forgiveness is no virtue; it excuses evil,” and may end with, “Therefore I am under no obligation ever to forgive.”

Maybe we should get off the Coquihalla Highway of Virtue for a bit and go back to the quiet streets and parking lots of our lives. Like driving a heavy wrecker to pull a truck out of a snowy ditch, the need to exercise virtue under extreme circumstances may arise unexpectedly for any of us. But mercifully, those occasions are relatively rare. Like practicing safe driving skills in “garden-variety” winter conditions, opportunities to practice those virtues in less demanding circumstances abound.

The teen who “forgets” to call when coming home late; the sibling who teases nonstop; the co-worker who takes undue credit for a project; the neighbor with obnoxious habits or opinions; the spouse or lover who does something selfish; the customer (or salesperson) who’s rude and impatient … the list is endless of “moderate winter weather” opportunities to practice patience, tolerance and forgiveness.

Like the heavy-rescue operators with generations of experience to draw upon, we have many resources to call on as we practice the moral equivalent of driving out of a black-ice skid. Every great religious, ethical and philosophical tradition has thought extensively about virtues: what they look like, how they obligate us and what disciplines are needed to develop and exercise them. Despite their differences, those traditions agree on this: Practice may not make perfect, but it builds “moral muscle memory” that causes virtue to become habitual.

I hope that no “hypothetical horrible” becomes reality for you. But even more, I hope that focusing on worst-case scenarios doesn’t prevent you from putting into daily practice such virtues as honesty, courage and faithfulness. Doing so in minor crises means that when we’re faced with “horribles” that are anything but hypothetical, we are far better prepared than we’d imagined we could ever be.